The Contour System – Directional Wiring of Audio Parts

@bluemoodriver, thanks for your attention to this complicated topic. We need to clarify something about the difference and hierarchy of values in music now.

You talk about the technical characteristics of the surface-noise and frequency response - but the wires and their direction do not affect these things. Only indirectly, when the recording is lively enough to involve you in listening, there is an involuntary effect, when the noise and the frequency response curve seem to recede to the side and stop interfering with listening, and the music comes out to meet you.

A good musical performance has a certain direct message to the soul that practically does not depend on the noise level and the linearity of the frequency response, otherwise no one would have listened to 78 records and CD cassettes before. This is a very subtle substance that is formed during a live performance, consisting of many elusive things - musical intonations and shades. This substance is hierarchically the most valuable part of music, it makes you a music lover, makes you tap your foot to the rhythm or takes you to the clouds. As soon as your perception begins to confidently distinguish it from everything else, you begin to look for only this component of the music in any record. They say in rock, people are looking for the Drive, in jazz - the liberation of the soul, in classical music - voices of angels.

I have been researching this phenomenon for many years, trying to highlight it from the music so that the music will capture you even more. However, the selection of these subtle things almost always occurs at the expense of technical characteristics, it is extremely difficult to combine Hi-Fi and Music itself. So, according to my records, you do not need to judge the technical capabilities of vinyl, you can no problem playback vinyl linearly and without clicks, you just need a new record, an MC cartridge and a standard RIAA preamp.

The potency of the music itself is another matter. My recordings pull out the soul of the artist, he opens up to you much clearer than the options on YouTube. It is at this point that I would like to draw your attention.

So how do you like the singing of Heifetz violin and what about the difference? Perhaps your system is not open enough due to its complexity and the use of AirPlay, try an simplier system. Often Internet recordings sound more lively and clear directly from a mobile phone, no matter how strange it seemed to you.

Anton, "...your perception begins to confidently distinguish it from everything else..."

Differences in SQ can only be confidently distinguished by properly run blind testing.
If you are not testing blind, your results are personal and subjective and therefore not useful.

Exactly clearthinker although, people who are use to listening to known defects are better at identifying them without blind testing. The lay audiophile does not have access to this kind of equipment thus is flying blind. It is easy enough to build AB switch boxes. I'm surprised nobody sells them. Since the birth of remote control in audio it has become easy to switch sources. I have my old blind relay driven switch box with RCA ins and outs but I have not pulled that out in decades. I decided on the wire issue decades ago.

Anton, while all that true to some degree I find it most applicable in comparing performances of the same piece by different artists. You forgot to mention the visceral component to live music that is frequently missing from reproductions. 

clearthinker

Differences in SQ can only be confidently distinguished by properly run blind testing.

Blind testing certainly has its place in audio - although not so much for the typical audiophile - but this statement is completely false. Those who insist on blind testing usually cite "placebo effect" or "expectation bias" as justification for their rather odd belief system. Those are very real mechanisms, no doubt, but they are not absolute. Placebo effect will not cure cancer. No blind testing is required to distinguish between extreme examples of audio components, nor is it always required to detect one that is malfunctioning.

If you are not testing blind, your results are personal and subjective and therefore not useful.

You’d be better off speaking for yourself rather than for others. You may well indeed require blind testing to know how something sounds, but that’s not a universal trait.

So, @clearthinker, please tell us about your blind tests. How were they conducted, how many test subjects, what were the results?

@clearthinker
Differences in SQ can only be confidently distinguished by properly run blind testing.If you are not testing blind, your results are personal and subjective and therefore not useful.

Almost twenty years ago, when I first realized that I was hearing the sound of a wire and that it was not a hallucination, I tortured myself and my friends long enough to test the audibility of these effects. Now I just double-check myself after a while and that’s it.

At the same time some mistakes are still left, but blind tests are not a remedy for it. Moreover, in our case, the blind tests lead to system errors themselves. To evaluate quality of the wire we need, among other things, to assess expert’s involvement in listening, that is, how he reacts sensually to certain music, but the blind test was developed by scientists for quite another purpose - to determine the difference in the audible sound (frequency response, noise, distortion). This is the whole problem, scientists test the wrong thing, and then they believe the Stradivarius violins sound worse than some ordinary-level instruments.